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ASHA’s journal program uses the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.) for guidance on editorial policies, as well as for manuscript style and formatting. Differences stemming from unique needs of the field and of the journals are set forth here and in the Instructions for Authors.
It is the responsibility of authors submitting articles for publication to review and adhere to these policies. Authors are also advised to familiarize themselves with the additional sources linked to within specific policies on this page.
Please send any general inquiries to journals{at}asha.org. Questions specific to a particular journal may be sent via the e-mail addresses found in the Instructions to Authors.
For additional guidance on editorial and production matters, particularly with regard to manuscript style/formatting and publication requirements, please consult the Instructions for Authors.
ASHA recognizes the importance of authors’ use of their work in the furtherance of scholarship and research. Although a copyright transfer is signed by authors at the time of submission, authors should be aware that they retain many rights for noncommercial use of the material. Express permission for use is only required in circumstances stipulated on the copyright transfer form.
Classroom TeachingOnly those figures that require the extra dimension of color to convey essential information will be published in print as color figures. The editor will determine the need for color. Authors will be invoiced for the half the cost of color in a published article. Payment of such charges is voluntary; although payment is greatly encouraged to help defray costs, nonpayment will not have an effect on publication of the figures or tables in color. See also Page Charges.
As part of the manuscript submission process, authors are required to disclose any real or potential conflicts of interest that could be seen as having an influence on the research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, or funding by an equipment or materials manufacturer for efficacy research).
Sources of outside support for research, including funding, equipment, and supplies, must be named during the submission process (and questions to that effect will be presented online to authors as part of the article submission process). In addition, authors must disclose any financial or other nonprofessional benefit(s) that might result from the publication of the manuscript and that reviewers or readers might consider to have affected the conduct or reporting of the work.
If the author is uncertain about what might be considered a conflict of interest, he or she should err on the side of full disclosure by reporting the potential conflict when requested to do so during submission. Information about conflicts of interest may be made available to reviewers at the editor's discretion. The role(s) of the support organization, if any, in the collection of data, in its analysis and interpretation, and in the right to approve or disapprove publication of the finished manuscript also must be detailed during the submission process. If a support agency claims the right to approve/disapprove publication, the author should have completed this process by the time of manuscript submission.
If, in the editor's judgment, the author has a real or potential conflict of interest, that conflict must be acknowledged with a disclosure statement on the first page of the article. Authors will be informed of this decision before acceptance.
During submission of a manuscript, the author will be required to affirm that
Letters of permission must accompany the uploaded manuscript file during submission. Review of a manuscript will not begin until the following has occurred:
Accepted articles are published online first in ASHA’s Papers in Press collection. No copyediting occurs before publication at that stage. Therefore, authors must affirm at submission that they recognize they will liable for any claims or penalties resulting from the unauthorized publication of copyrighted material.
The widespread move to online publishing has brought forth many opportunities, but also many challenges, when it comes to the dissemination of scholarly research.
In developing policies on postpublication changes to journal articles, ASHA has taken into account the needs of the many users of the journals—researchers, librarians, archivists, and indexers—in addition to those of the authors and editors, to articulate policies that can be uniformly implemented and enduring. The following sources were consulted in creating this policy:
As the nature of scholarly publishing continues to evolve, ASHA will monitor trends, keep abreast of the policies of its fellow publishers, and regularly review the recommendations of organizations such as those listed above. Adjustments will inevitably be made; however, the following types of corrections are used by ASHA to help preserve the accuracy,reliability, and permanence of the scholarly record.
Erratum: a correction of any sort. ASHA has in the past made a distinction between a correction notice and an erratum. The former was for errors made by the production office but not of a substantive nature, and the latter was for substantive errors made by either the author or the production office. In keeping with guidelines from National Library of Medicine, this distinction is no longer made by ASHA. An error is an error, and its correction will take the form of an erratum regardless of its source or characteristics.
Retraction: rejection or disavowal of published work because of fraud, plagiarism, ethical breaches, or other such scientific malfeasance, or because one’s work is rendered invalid as a result of the malfeasance or misconduct of another author’s work on which one’s article is based. A retraction containing explanatory information is published and bidirectionally linked, and the original article online is clearly and permanently marked as having been retracted (e.g., by a watermark on each page).
Removal: deletion of content from the scholarly record (extremely rare). Bibliographic information will remain a part of the scholarly record, but the actual article content will be removed in the event of a court order to do so; if there is a clear risk of legal liability to the author, publisher, or copyright holder or if the content poses a danger to the public.
Hypothetical ExamplesAuthors, particularly those who are ASHA members, are encouraged to review these documents and apply them to their research and scholarly endeavors. In addition, the following policies and their associated resources apply to the publication of research in ASHA journals.
Protection of Humans in ResearchFor more background on the policy and the specific terms of the law requiring it, please review the information provided on NIH’s Public Access Web site.
ASHA Permits Full Compliance With the NIH PolicyASHA’s copyright transfer agreement has been revised to reflect current policy. Also, NIH is inviting further public comment. Refer back to this page for possible changes in the future.
How the PubMed Central Deposit Process WorksOnce you have submitted your manuscript, you will receive an NIHMS ID number. PubMed Central will then perform quality assurance checks and create a retrieval record for the manuscript. At that time, your PubMed Central ID (PMCID) number will be available.
As of May 25, 2008, you need to cite the PMCID or the NIHMS ID, or both, when citing your manuscript in NIH applications, proposals, or progress reports. Consult the NIH FAQ for more information.
Voluntary Open AccessIt is ASHA policy to bill authors for page charges, at the rate of $100 per page, when articles and letters exceed five published journal pages. ASHA will also invoice authors for half the printing cost of any color figures or tables. Payment of page and color charges is voluntary and does not affect publication in any way. Payments go into a special fund dedicated to the expansion of the online journals archive so that as much information as possible is available electronically. Authors are encouraged to obtain funding from their institution or request funds for such expenses as part of their grants.
Except in the case of Special Reports (see below), ASHA journals do not consider for review submissions that have been published in the same, or essentially the same, form elsewhere. Authors who are modifying or extending work that has previously been published must notify the editor of the possible previous publication of their submission and provide a rationale for considering the new work to be substantially different from the original. They must also clearly acknowledge these prior publications in their manuscript.
This policy is meant to apply to all types of previously published materials, including conference proceedings and book chapters that have been offered for public sale. It does not necessarily apply to manuscripts that previously have been abstracted for proceedings of a conference or by a dissertation/thesis abstracting service. It also may not apply to duplications or revisions of work previously published in a form such as a university or government report that has limited circulation or availability, whether in print or online (e.g., working papers disseminated primarily among colleagues at the same institution).
In some unclear cases, a decision must be made to determine whether a manuscript represents original or duplicate work. This decision always rests with the editor of the ASHA journal, who may consult with the chair of ASHA's Publications Board as part of the decision process.
The ASHA Publications Board strives for timely dissemination of research articles following acceptance for publication in one of ASHA’s scholarly journals. Because the time lag between the acceptance of a manuscript for publication and the actual publication may be as long as 9 months, our journals now publish Papers in Press. Papers in Press is a collection of accepted manuscripts that have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication but have not been copyedited, formatted, or published in final form in the journal.
Papers will be published in a journal’s Papers in Press collection as soon as possible after publication—generally a minimum of 10 days and a maximum of 1 month. A paper remains in the collection until published in final form in the journal; at that time it is removed from Papers in Press.
Manuscripts are considered published upon being made available in Papers in Press. They are indexed in MEDLINE and are available through searches in PubMed, Google, and other venues. Prepublication information, including the date, appears on the PDF file of each manuscript in Papers in Press. The format for citing these manuscripts is as follows:
Brockmann, M., Storck, C., Carding, P. N., & Drinnan, M. J. (2008). Voice loudness and gender effects on jitter and shimmer in healthy adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Published online July 29, 2008. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2008/06-0208)
Readers who want to respond to the content of a paper may do so using the traditional letter to the editor process after final publication of the paper.
Clinical studies appearing in ASHA journals must meet recognized standards for reporting. Articles reporting randomized clinical trials must follow the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT), nonrandomized clinical evaluations must follow the Transparency of Reporting Evaluations of Nonrandomized Designs (TREND), and studies of diagnostic accuracy must meet the Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD). Authors should find these standards useful as guides in designing and implementing their studies; however, it is recognized that the standards apply directly to the reporting of studies rather than to their implementation.
ASHA journals may publish manuscripts on cross-disciplinary issues that have been previously published or that are being simultaneously published in two or more journals. Acceptance is contingent on approval of the manuscript by the editor of the journal in consultation with at least one associate editor and the chair of the Publications Board. Such exceptional content will be included under the heading of “Special Report” with a note on the title page of the article indicating that it was not subject to the journal’s typical peer review process.
Supplements to ASHA journals consist of articles that for various reasons fall outside of the normal types of manuscripts submitted to the journals. The topics or concepts of a supplement must be approved by the Publications Board. When published, supplements are bound within a scheduled issue of the journal using supplementary pages so that the queue for regular content is not disrupted. Supplements may include, but are not restricted to, proceedings of conferences, monographs, and groups of related papers.
Procedure for initiating a supplement:
For an example of a recently published supplement, see the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
All manuscripts (except Special Reports) are peer reviewed, typically by at least two reviewers with relevant expertise, an associate editor responsible for manuscripts in a given area, and the editor of the journal.
Authors may disagree with the decision of the editors of ASHA journals and may wish to challenge and appeal those decisions.
Peer review of submissions to ASHA journals is typically open, with the author(s) known to the reviewers. Authors may request blind review but identities will still be known to the editor and associate editors. Requests must be made at the time of submission and the author is responsible for removal of identifying information from the manuscript. Reviewers’ identities are not revealed to the author(s) unless reviewers choose to include their names in the review.
Manuscripts submitted to ASHA journals are privileged information. They are confidential and must not be discussed with anyone other than the journal editor and the assigned associate editor. Occasionally, a reviewer must consult with colleagues on some aspect of a paper, such as the statistical analysis. Such consultations should occur only with the editor’s or associate editor’s permission and without providing the author’s identity or details of the manuscript’s content. After the final publication decision has been made, reviewers should destroy their copies of the manuscript.
For the purpose of training PhD students in the peer review process, a manuscript reviewer/mentor may engage a PhD student in the review process under the mentor’s guidance. The mentor bears full responsibility for the review. The PhD student will be bound by the same principles of confidentiality that govern the review process as a whole. It is the responsibility of the mentor to inform the journal editorial administrator, the Editor, and AE of the mentee’s identity. The editorial administrator will enter the information into the manuscript administrative record.
The principal criteria for acceptance are significance of the topic or experimental question, conformity to rigorous standards of evidence and scholarship, and clarity of writing. ASHA membership is not a factor in selection.
Manuscripts that have not received a final decision at the time of an editor transition (this typically occurs on November 15 of the final year of an editor’s term) will continue the peer review process under the same associate editor and reviewers wherever possible to preserve consistency.
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